France raises security alert to highest level as world leaders react to Nice 'terror attack’

Nice Church Terrorist Attack Aftermath
Police patrol at night in front of Notre Dame Basilica in Nice following the terror attack
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Luke O'Reilly30 October 2020

France has raised its security alert to its highest level following a suspected terror attack at a church in Nice.

President Emmanuel Macron said he would deploy thousands more soldiers to protect important sites such as places of worship and schools after Thursday’s knife attack, which left three people dead.

Speaking outside the Notre Dame Basilica church, Macron said France had been attacked "over our values, for our taste for freedom, for the ability on our soil to have freedom of belief ... And I say it with great clarity again today: We will not give any ground."

Police armed with automatic weapons set up a security cordon around the church, which is on Nice's Avenue Jean Medecin, the French Riviera city's main shopping thoroughfare.

In Paris, France's National Assembly observed a minute's silence.

Nice Church Terrorist Attack Aftermath
The Notre Dame Basilica church
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US President Donald Trump voiced sympathy for the people of France after the attack. "America stands with our oldest Ally in this fight. These Radical Islamic terrorist attacks must stop immediately. No country, France or otherwise can long put up with it!" Trump said in a Twitter post.

Condemnations of the attack also came from Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, whose President Tayyip Erdogan earlier this week slammed Macron and France over displays of the Prophet Mohammad.

Chief anti-terrorist prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said the suspect in Thursday's attack was a Tunisian man born in 1999 who had arrived in Europe on September 20 in Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunisia that is the main landing point for migrants from Africa.

Nice Church Terrorist Attack Aftermath
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The attack came less than two weeks after a middle-school teacher in a Paris suburb was beheaded by an 18-year-old attacker who was apparently incensed by the teacher showing a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed in class.

It also comes amid growing anger over caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that were republished in recent months by the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo — renewing debate in France and the Muslim world over the depictions that Muslims consider offensive but are protected by French free speech laws.

Nice Church Terrorist Attack Aftermath
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Ricard told a news conference in Nice that the man had entered the city by train early on Thursday morning and made his way to the church, where he allegedly stabbed and killed the 55-year-old sexton and beheaded a 60-year-old woman.

He is also said to have stabbed a 44-year-old woman who fled to a nearby cafe where she raised the alarm before dying, Ricard said. Police then arrived and confronted the suspect, and shot and wounded him.

The suspect is in hospital in critical condition, he said.

An investigation was opened for murder and attempted murder in connection with a terrorist enterprise, a common term for such crimes.

The prosecutor said the attacker, who was born in 1999, was not the radar of intelligence agencies as a potential threat.

Nice's mayor, Christian Estrosi, said the attack was similar to the beheading by a Chechen man earlier this month near Paris of teacher Samuel Paty, who had used cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in a civics class about freedom of expression.